The Hidden Job Market

By
Fintros
—
September 2017

In the spirit of strict anonymity, names and all identifying information have been removed from the below article. To learn more about Fintros - the leading anonymous opportunity platform for finance leaders - please visit Fintros.com.

As VP of People & Culture, above everything, my role is to hire the right
people with the right skills that will seamlessly fit into our unique firm culture.
As much as I love job postings, I attribute much of our firm’s success to the ‘hidden
job market’ – or in other words, referrals and networking.

I take
internal HR referrals very seriously, as I aim to continue to champion our firm’s
leading IR program. Instinctually, our employees are motivated to refer folks that
actually get hired as ultimately the referrer wants the referee to greatly represent
them. Historically, internal referrals have proven to be excellent culture fits
within our team – and can actually create measurable improvement for our business.Beyond our referral program, I absolutely love LinkedIn. I happen to be
very active on the platform. In fact, I’ve personally met, interviewed and hired
great candidates that I had never met before LinkedIn. I’m an open networker on
LinkedIn and personally enjoy persistent candidates that actually reach out, are
inquisitive and request to meet for coffee and/or phone chats. Given my commitment
to diversity and inclusiveness, I strongly believe that I greatly benefit from being
open and meeting as many people as possible. Other HR leaders might view this differently
and prefer to keep a narrower online reach – but I’ve found that sometimes that
tends to structure your candidate pool as rather saturated and one-dimensional.
For prospective candidates, I couldn’t stress more the importance of networking
and meeting many prospective employers face to face to best showcase your potential
fit.

Roughly half of our job listings are never posted online – and
are directly filled through the ‘hidden job market’. As much as I love job boards,
it doesn’t always lead to candidates that have the right mix of technical and soft
skills for the role. Technical skills, education and work experience are all incredibly
important – but I would argue even less important than fit. While ‘fit’ itself has
different definitions to different people - I personally define fit in the following
four ways: 1) how hard the candidate is willing to work, 2) how well they can hold
a conversation, 3) how well can they work with co-workers of all seniority levels
and 4) how well can they over-achieve on their assigned work load. As a people person,
I’ve been quite successful in assessing candidates for this important quality during
phone and in-person interviews, but we’ve also began leveraging tools to make data-driven
decisions and assessing candidate-culture fit very early on in the process.

The
Important Part of Any Job Listings

The diction!
I’ve found that it’s incredibly important to use the correct diction in your job
descriptions - those that best represent and describe your company culture. It should
really speak to your culture, preferred employee competencies and firm values.

Having
said that, even if I do post the listing on a job board, it’s very rare that I would
exclusively rely on the incoming candidate pool from any one job board. Rather,
I will almost always send the job listing to my network of HR leaders, candidate
influencers and colleagues. I’m very fortunate to have a strong community
of HR professionals and support from talent marketplaces that introduce me to passive
candidate that ordinarily would not be applying for jobs on job boards. Given I
meet so many candidates, the process is inherently reciprocal.

Define
the Importance of Candidate Humility

I would
attribute many successful candidate hires to finding individuals with the right
amount of humility. I think humility and humble leadership – servant leadership
– breeds great culture. To be quite frank, based on recent events over the last
decade, it’s becoming one of the most important candidate qualities that should
be at the forefront of the recruitment process for every HR leader. One of the best
examples of such leadership is Warren Buffet and his approach to culture and leadership
at Berkshire Hathaway.

If you don’t believe me, read the Harvard Business
Review (or any other leading publication), it seems like every other HR article
highlights the importance of humility. It’s no longer about policies and just adhering
to processes - it’s much more than that. Because of this, HR has taken a much more
active voice in many historical non-pure HR functions – including partnering with
senior executive leadership, finance and product teams to hire and build a truly
humble team.

Mind you, it’s also an incredibly difficult quality to
assess in a stranger. Over the span of my career, I’ve become very attuned to, as
well as accurate in assessing humility by asking the right questions – including
questions like: ‘tell me about a time when you had a great failure’ and what happened,
and ‘how did you deal with it.’ I then listen very closely to watch the candidate’s
body language, voice cadence and overall attitude as they answer the question(s).
Often the wrong answer will include something like: ‘I made mistake XYZ, but I moved
on from it.’ For the most part, that can be great but it’s not the strongest example
of showcasing that you have humility. Some of the best answers might include: ‘I
was the VP of Finance and I was leading a large team of 18 Senior Accountants and
Auditors and we failed XYZ project. As humiliating as it was, I stood up and apologized
to my team – it was very hard, but it was also incredibly empowering.’ In short,
it’s really how the answer is conveyed; you can see it their eyes, and hear it in
their voices. I can confidently say that candidates who can honestly admit failures
and improve from these failures tend to be the very best hires.